


in my face it still appears

by pyrophane



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Canon Compliant, Light Pining, M/M, Reverse Chronology, Two Fraught Conversations In The Dark And One In The Light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-10 00:21:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17415383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrophane/pseuds/pyrophane
Summary: You keep the things you want at arm’s length, and that way it’s easier to convince yourself you don’t really want them at all.(Or: three gifts Jaemin gives to Renjun.)





	in my face it still appears

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lateralplosion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lateralplosion/gifts).
  * Inspired by [a lot like yesterday, a lot like never](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15669321) by [lateralplosion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lateralplosion/pseuds/lateralplosion). 



> dear lav: _a lot like yesterday, a lot like never_ is one of my favourite nct fics ever and i hope i came close to doing it justice ♡ it's a bit of a loose remix, but the connection to the original should become more clear as you go along... thank you for giving me the chance to work with it!!
> 
> title from poem #40 of the hyakunin isshu by taira no kanemori

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

忍ぶれど   
色に出でにけり  
わが恋は  
  
物や思ふと  
人の問ふまで

//

Though I would hide it,   
In my face it still appears—   
My fond, secret love.   
  
And now he questions me:   
"Is something bothering you?" 

\- 平兼盛 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You never wear the bracelet anymore,” Jaemin says.

They’re walking back to the dorms from the bus stop. By unspoken assent they’re drawing the journey out, holding the inevitable at arm’s length. The evening opens up over them, lovely low-saturation violet, scoured clean of clouds by the wind; the days are lengthening, but not quickly enough to stave off the skies staining cherry dark by five.

“Ah,” Renjun says. The words come haltingly, honesty with its edges sanded down. “I didn’t think you’d notice.” Jaemin only smiles, and any finer detail to the expression is impossible for Renjun to parse. “This was nice, though,” Renjun continues. “Going out today.”

There’s a vending machine by the side of the footpath that Jaemin eyes and then pivots around to inspect, and Renjun stops to wait for him. Backlit and haloed by the streetlamp, the light bleeding an indistinct border around the punched-out silhouette of his body, Jaemin looks unreal, more negative space than person. Smoke caught in his hair like a memory.

“Like our trainee days, right? Remember the first time we ever—”

“At that place near the Sinsa Station side in Garosu-gil,” Renjun says. He ducks his head to hide the warmth rising to his cheeks. “I remember.”

Nobody had known them, then, even if they’d taken off their facemasks. They were just any two boys out for a meal together. But it’d felt like something preordained, a secret anticipatory rush to the entire endeavour: soon people would. A promise to himself and, in retrospect, to Jaemin, too.

At the vending machine, Jaemin feeds a note into the slot, leans down and fishes out a green plastic bottle. Tosses it to Renjun. “Here,” he says. “For you.”

It’s jasmine tea. Renjun might have mentioned it once on a radio show or a VLive, maybe. He curls his fingers around the dewing plastic, swipes a thumb through the condensation. “You remembered,” he says, and it comes out more quietly than he’d intended.

“Of course I did,” Jaemin says. Matter-of-fact. “I remember everything you tell me.”

Renjun fixes his eyes on the bottle cap. Keeps his voice carefully light. “You know,” he says. “I can never really tell when you’re being serious.”

“I’m always serious,” comes the reply. Jaemin’s gaze, when Renjun looks up, is clear and frank, as it always is.

“Well, you say that,” Renjun says.

“Do you not believe me?”

Renjun pauses. “I don’t know.”

Around them, the wind is picking up, ruffling its fingers through Jaemin’s hair. That earnest, boyish handsomeness, arrow to the heart. The conversation simultaneously shallower and deeper than either of them are letting on, though Renjun can’t tell if Jaemin even knows he’s doing it. His own attempts at masking tone come out clumsy, amateurish to his own ears, the affectation something he’s certain Jaemin must pick up on.

“How can I convince you, then?” Jaemin says.

It doesn’t even matter the extent to which he means it. Longing hits Renjun like a blow to the throat anyway. A chrysalis of a feeling, transition state, something half-formed, the consciousness to it souped up. Armoured in layers. “Why do you keep giving me things?” he says instead, counter. “The bracelet, the book—even this—” 

“I like giving people things,” Jaemin says, without missing a beat. “I want to make them—you—happy.” The unspoken question:  _is that okay?_ Its attendant response:  _I wish you didn’t feel like you had to ask._

The evening collapses down, a space coalescing like a held breath. Already the day feels insubstantial as a dream. But it’s not an isolated incident, and that makes it better, or at least easier to choke down expectation. It’s too easy to read into it, because Jaemin is who he is, and Renjun desperately wants to believe him, despite himself.

The inevitable looms. Renjun wishes he couldn’t see it, but he, too, is who he is, the unasked-for hope rising slow to the surface like steam unfolding from the grill at the restaurant earlier, and Renjun playing damage control for himself, stamping it out before it develops into something he can’t afford to feel.

“Oh,” Renjun says. “I see,” and Jaemin’s gaze goes sharp as a knife and just as carelessly, carefully lovely. For a moment he looks like he’s going to say something, but all he does is close his mouth and step out of the fishbowl of light cast by the streetlamp.

Renjun’s fingers are almost numb where they’re wrapped around the chilled bottle, but he doesn’t shift his hand. He keeps walking forward, back towards everything that’s waiting for them at the dorms, and Jaemin keeps pace at his shoulder, and it will have to be enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jaemin is looking at his mouth again. This is not something that is in itself out of the ordinary, because Jaemin seems to abide by a strict personal policy of never looking his friends in the eye if he can look them in the mouth instead. But it’s not something he does with intent, or at least not any more than a wildfire intends to scorch the earth. Only a carryover from all the time they spend on camera, the charm Jaemin doesn’t quite know how to compartmentalise. Renjun knows it means nothing. He _knows_ this. And yet—

He’ll readjust. It's been a while since he was the focus of that overbearing gaze; he’d forgotten what it feels like to be looked at so deeply by someone who wants nothing from him at all. Except then Jaemin won’t stop seeking him out, moth to a flame, or the other way around.   

“If you stare any harder at Renjun-hyung you’re going to burn a hole right through his face,” Jisung calls, not even glancing up from his 3DS.

“Hey,” Jaemin protests. From where he’s standing in the doorway, Renjun is decidedly not looking at him, but he can hear the pout in Jaemin’s voice.

Jeno laughs and pats the carpet beside him where he’s seated on the floor, leaning against his bed. “Come sit down?”

“Give me a second,” Renjun says. He takes a step into the room, reaching to the side of the doorframe, and understanding tinged with apprehension unfolds across Jeno’s face.

“Do you… really have to do that every time?”

Renjun smiles serenely, finger on the light switch. Maintaining unwavering eye contact with an increasingly alarmed-looking Jeno, he flicks it off. On. The light flickers, takes a moment to stabilise into full brightness again. He says, “I’m the Renjun who lights up the world.”

“Oh my god,” Jisung mutters. “He’s lost it.”

“I’m older than you,” Renjun says mildly. “Also, what are you doing here?”

“This is my room too, you know,” Jisung says. “Hyung,” he tacks on, belatedly. “How come you didn’t ask _Jaemin-hyung_ what he’s doing in  _our_ room?”

“I’ve given up on trying to understand why Jaemin does anything,” Renjun says.

He makes the mistake of meeting Jeno’s eyes again at this pivotal moment. And maybe Jeno doesn't have the unblinking intensity of Jaemin's blistering stare, but there's a bright straightforwardness in his gaze that Renjun can’t help but flounder away from. Jeno narrows his eyes at him. That could just as easily be attributable to the fact that he isn’t wearing his glasses, though, so Renjun chooses to ignore the scrutiny.

“Actually,” Jaemin says, standing up, and Renjun looks at him properly for the first time since entering the room. “Injun, can I borrow you for a moment?”

“Sure,” Renjun says, in a tone as neutral as Jaemin’s expression, except probably more studied.

Jaemin crosses the hallway to the room he shares with the manager. He doesn’t bother with the light switch before going for the drawers and Renjun hovers in the doorway before taking one step in, and then another.

He turns around with a book in his hands and holds it out. Renjun takes it. “Saw this the other day when I was out with Jeno and Donghyuck,” he says.

“ _The Courage to be Disliked,”_ Renjun reads, off the front of the book. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Not at all,” Jaemin says. “Just thought it seemed like something you might like.”

“Oh,” Renjun says, taken aback by how casually he says it, like they’re people who have the kind of relationship where they could look at things and think they might make the other person happy. “Um. Thank you. For thinking of me.”

This is the part where Jaemin replies _I’m always thinking of you,_ and Renjun shoves an elbow into his ribs in exasperation, and they laugh it off and move back into familiar territory. Instead Jaemin tips his head to the side. It’s too bright for this, Renjun thinks, out of nowhere. It needs to be a minimum of five shades dimmer in the room, dark enough for at least the illusion of distance.

“Injun-ah,” Jaemin says. “Are you happy?”

The transparency in the question throws Renjun. One of the first nights after Jaemin came back, the both of them sitting crosslegged on the floor of Jaemin’s room, Jaemin had said  _i_ _t’s good to be back,_ smile flickering like one of the candles Renjun had lit around them, and the uncertainty of the expression stymied Renjun so badly—settled over Jaemin’s face with such visceral wrongness—that he’d had no choice but to lunge forward, seize the back of Jaemin’s shirt, haul him close. Smooth a hand down between the shoulderblades, though this wasn’t something they _did,_ but in the space between his arms he felt Jaemin go still, then shake near imperceptibly apart, then go still again.

There’s something tremulous about the stillness now, a vessel full to the brim, tipping-point suspension. Honesty for honesty, Renjun supposes; it’s only fair. And the truth is that Renjun is not unhappy. You don’t devote your youth to an industry like this without loving its heart enough that everything else can, on balance, be struck out, rounded down. Idolhood is a prioritisation game. Anything is bearable so long as the still moment standing on the stage looking out over the wash of lightsticks in front of him never loses its struck-bell breathlessness, and he’s careful to make sure it doesn’t.

So Renjun isn’t unhappy. He does as much as he can to keep himself not unhappy, rations out the contentment or whatever passes for it to make it last longer. You keep the things you want at arm’s length, and that way it’s easier to convince yourself you don’t really want them at all. If he’d made a different set of choices, maybe he might have been happier—staying in China, growing up quietly—but there’s no way of knowing for sure, so he tries not to think about it. And he isn’t unhappy. That’s close enough.

“Yes,” Renjun says. A steadiness to the words he isn’t sure he entirely feels. “Are you?”

“Happier now that I’m back,” Jaemin says, and the openness stitches itself up again, a little more securely. Or maybe it doesn’t; it’s not like Renjun would be able to tell. The light at Renjun’s back, the light that could flood the room if he reached for the switch, everything in photo negative for the split second before his eyes readjust to the way things have been all along. The unrecognisable sincerity cleaving apart. Just an arm’s length between him and Jaemin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The lights on the seventh floor of Shinsegae Duty Free lacquer the tiles in a clear gloss so polished they look liquid, almost unsteady underfoot. “We used to do this all the time,” Jaemin is saying, as they navigate the maze of displays. “Jeno and Mark-hyung and I. When we were rookies.”

Renjun idly inspects a row of Michael Kors watches and doesn’t think about how much he missed out on by joining so much later than the others.

“Though it wasn’t anything, really—we always got in trouble,” Jaemin adds, stretching an arm across Renjun’s shoulders, and Renjun can’t help but smile at that, hidden as it is by his facemask.

Some part of him will always be on the other side of the glass, looking in. He wishes he had Chenle’s easy self-assurance, that unshakeable certainty in his own place, though Chenle didn’t even have the luxury of fluency, at the start. But it’s bearable—anything is bearable, and the anchor of Jaemin’s arm lessens the weight, too.

Jaemin pauses in front of a Daniel Wellington display. “What about those?”

“The wrist cuffs?” Renjun says. Jaemin’s already tugged down his mask to flag down the sales assistant hovering a few steps away from them.

The cuff he ends up holding is rose gold, pretty in an understated way, and its matched pair gleams silver in Jaemin’s hands. “I’ll take this one,” he decides on impulse, but Jaemin stalls him with a hand on his wrist.

“I’m paying for both,” Jaemin says. Renjun glances sharply at him, uncertain again.

“Both? But—”

“It’s a souvenir,” Jaemin says cheerfully, as the assistant rings up the transaction. “My first ever secret outing with Injunnie, of course I want to remember it.”

“Who even does that,” Renjun says, making a valiant stab at flippancy and missing the mark rather miserably.

Jaemin lifts the circle of metal out of the bag. Draws one of Renjun’s hands towards him. “We’ll just say it’s your birthday present.”

Renjun swallows. “My birthday isn’t until March,” he mumbles. It’s a token protest. He tilts his head a little closer. Blood-vessel ache and just as inextricable from the body.

Jaemin fits the cuff over his hand, a little cold where it presses against his skin. So careful it hurts to look at him—of course Jaemin is capable of this kind of attention, too, almost cautious enough to be mistaken for hesitation. “Then happy early birthday, Injunnie,” Jaemin says, fingers soft against the delicate inside of his wrist. He doesn’t let go, and the words dry up partway in Renjun’s throat.

The metal is warm against his skin, now. Indistinguishable from it. He looks at the rose gold, at the indescribable expression on Jaemin’s face, and for a single moment he thinks, dizzy with certainty, that Jaemin will try to kiss him right there under the glitter of lights ricocheting off the glass display cases, the vision crystallising with such perfect clarity it feels like a memory. Pressure of Jaemin's hand on the back of his neck, pulling him in. Mouth covering his, right over the mask.

The moment goes brittle, cracks open like ice. Jaemin pulls his hands away, fumbling for his phone, and Renjun can’t help the awareness like the view through a camera lens sharpening into focus of the space between them multiplying, contact to handspan-width to the blank of an inverted body. How keenly an absence is felt, once the alternative becomes known to you.

“Busted,” Jaemin sighs, glancing back up at Renjun. Light in his eyes, the contained mirth of the day distilled down. That’s a souvenir, too, delicate as the metal circling his wrist.

Renjun smiles back, the expression smoothing itself out. “Oops,” he says.

After all, it’d taken years but Jaemin had come back in the end, the distance like an elastic band snapping into place, bringing Jaemin back to them. And when Jaemin reaches out and grasps his elbow, it feels less like something new and unexpected, and more like the second half of a movement already begun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on twitter [@juncheolsoo](https://twitter.com/juncheolsoo) or cc [@inheritance](https://curiouscat.me/inheritance)!!


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